


and they were roommates, oh my god they were roommates

by birdcat



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Future Fic, ITS ABOUT THE YEARNING, M/M, alkene groups, exhaustive descriptions of very tender touching, wrist anatomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24016852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdcat/pseuds/birdcat
Summary: Sakusa doesn’t say anything, he just keeps his eyes on Kuroo. A pause. He lowers his wrist, slowly wraps it in the fingers of his opposite hand. There’s a mole on his index finger, right beside the second knuckle, a pinpoint reminder of the two on his forehead. Sakusa tightens the grip on his own wrist until the skin flushes white, holds it out further for Kuroo to see. “You show me,” Sakusa says.“What?”“The muscle. Pronator quadratus. Show me where it is. On me.”Sakusa Kiyoomi is a pre-med. Kuroo Tetsurou is an organic chemistry major. They are roommates. Oh my god, they are roommates.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 60
Kudos: 512





	and they were roommates, oh my god they were roommates

Sakusa Kiyoomi is 192 centimeters tall. He lives on the left side of room 126E of the west hall of Tokyo University’s sophomore dorms. His clothes are only ever in the closet on his side of this dorm room, or folded carefully in the hamper at the foot of his bed, where they do not last long before being washed in some mysterious location that cannot possibly be the dorm’s laundry room. The dorm’s laundry room makes everyone’s clothes smell just a little bit like stale plastic; Sakusa’s clothes smell like absolutely nothing.

The left half of the throw rug that spans the space between the two beds is vacuumed into near-unrecognizability beside the right half. There is a clear, crisp border running down the center of the rug where the color goes from un-vacuumed dusty blue to vacuumed un-dusty blue. Similarly, Sakusa’s papers are kept exclusively on the well-dusted right side of his desk and his laptop exclusively on the well-dusted left, its corners aligned with the box of n96-grade medical face masks beside it with some kind of clinical precision. Clinical precision, Kuroo thinks. He _is_ pre-med.

He is also the best high school level wing spiker in the entire country of Japan. Or _was_ , Kuroo thinks. Now he’s pre-med. Now he’s something Kuroo can’t put a finger on.

Kuroo Tetsurou is 188 centimeters tall. He lives on the right side of room 126E of the west hall of Tokyo University’s sophomore dorms. He’s not pre-med, he’s chemistry.

Can he _be_ chemistry? If there’s anyone in the world who can _be_ chemistry, it might well be him; he clearly is not wasting any time being anything other than _chemistry_ , given that his clothes are not located in either his closet or his hamper, and seem to have spread themselves out into every location that is not a closet or a hamper; given that his _chemistry_ papers are decidedly un-aligned with the box of n96 grade medical face masks that does not exist on his desk, and given that his shirts smell just a little bit like stale plastic, because he does not have access to whatever extradimensional washing machine Sakusa Kiyoomi uses and just uses the dorm’s laundry room like everybody else. He pulls a t-shirt from his bed beside him and presses it against his face to smell it. It’s kind of nice. It’s like a water bottle left in a sunny car for too long. He inhales again.

Kuroo does not like that Sakusa Kiyoomi is 192 centimeters tall. He’s fully aware that this is exactly the kind of thing that he has never given a single shit about before in his twenty years of life, and he’s equally aware that it’s going to continue to bother him anyways. It’s exactly the kind of thing that he’s only been spurred into giving a shit about by Sakusa Kiyoomi’s clinically precise 192-centimeter-tall presence in his dorm room, and his color-coded binders, and maybe the fact that they were never supposed to be roomates in the first place. But now they are, and they’re two weeks into the first semester of Kuroo’s sophomore year and there’s already a line on their carpet that indicates exactly where Kuroo has failed to vacuum it and Sakusa Kiyoomi has not. Exactly like how Kuroo has failed to surpass 190 centimeters, and Sakusa Kiyoomi has not.

Kuroo spins himself around in his swivel chair and considers the invisible divide in their room. Order. Disorder. The carpet might just be the least obvious thing about it, he realizes; the only announcement of life on Sakusa’s side is a single potted plant on his shelf that does not seem to die, despite Kuroo never having seen Sakusa so much as glance at it, while there is nothing on Kuroo’s side of the room that is _not_ an announcement of life. The strewn mass of his clothing approaches the invisible line in the middle of their room but avoids touching it with some dutiful sort of reverence. There’s a stack of discarded papers formed into an architectural impossibility on the floor beside his desk, but these too seem to shrink away from Sakusa’s half of the room in fear. The divide extends onto their walls as well, where Kuroo’s side of the room is plastered with sticky notes and crookedly-taped papers and reminders to _email prof. Tanaka_ and a semi-ironic Kodzuken fan poster, and Sakusa’s side is completely, clinically bare.

 _I tried to get a single. I didn’t. Don’t touch my things._ Those had been Sakusa’s instructions upon his inaugural entrance two weeks ago, as he stood masked and stiff and lysol-equipped in their doorway and made brittle eye contact with Kuroo across the room. Kuroo now swivels himself side to side in his swivel chair and studies their living space. Sakusa isn’t here. Kuroo imagines that he’s off doing his laundry; he only ever seems to be doing his laundry. A pair of Kuroo’s jeans lays rumpled on the ground such that its edge touches the vacuum-border on their carpet just barely, without crossing it. His face contorts.

 _Don’t touch my things,_ Sakusa had said. He’s followed the instructions. Sort of.

Kuroo stands up.

  
  
  


Later that afternoon, when Sakusa re-emerges from his extradimensional laundromat and shoulder-checks their room’s door open, Kuroo stiffens over his laptop.

The silence settles when Sakusa’s feet go still against the floor. It’s a couple of seconds before Kuroo lifts his gaze from his desk and risks a look at him. Sakusa stands there utterly statuesque, laundry bag against his chest, mask across his face, gaze cast across their room.

Kuroo’s half of the room is unrecognisable. It’s been completely cleared out, with his clothes missing from the floor and now either folded neatly in his closet or sitting dutifully in the hamper at the foot of his bed. His bed is cleared and made. The pillow is aligned with the headboard with geometric precision. Kuroo stares at it, stares at Sakusa staring at it. Even his posters have been straightened. Kuroo lifts a hand and presses it against the wall when one of the corners of _Kodzuken_ suddenly begins to slip, as if Sakusa’s arrival were its cue. He feels his neck go warm.

“Hm,” Sakusa offers, after several seconds of clinically bare silence. Kuroo watches with his hand still pressed to the wall as Sakusa shuffles his 192-centimeter-tall form towards his own bed, conspicuously avoiding eye contact with Kuroo as well as conspicuously avoiding foot contact with the side of the carpet that is still un-vacuumed and dusty blue. Kuroo doesn’t miss the look of discomfort on his face, even shielded behind that mask.

“That reminds me,” Kuroo says, gesturing at his side of the carpet. Sakusa is looking at him. The words are launching out of him before he can stop them. “Can I borrow your vacuum?”

  
  


***

  
  


Kuroo is on his back in his bed. The bed is still _“made,”_ to some measurable extent, with the pillow just slightly off-center and only one corner of the comforter folded over itself where his foot has buried itself in it. Kuroo squints and holds up a sheet of alkane structures up to the ceiling light. The rectangle of fluorescent glow serves to backlight the paper such that the confused tangle of _H_ s and _C_ s and lines connecting them are haloed gently in white, but does not reveal the answers.

Kuroo shoves himself upright with an elbow and fixes his worksheet with a look. This is an alkane structure he _knows_ , but can’t remember the name of. “A hydrocarbon bonded to a methyl group, _CH_ _3_ , _CH_ _2_ , chained back onto a . . .” This was something he’d been able to name in class, yesterday. He screws up his face at the chemical symbols. “A methyl group, single bonded, _CH_ _3_ , _CH_ _2_ _,_ goddammit.”

A voice from the other side of the room: “That’s an isobutyl group.”

Kuroo whips the paper aside to stare at Sakusa. He’s greeted with the back of Sakusa’s head. He sits unmoving at his desk, typing away at a spreadsheet. The fluorescent ceiling light shines off of his curls.

There is a conspicuous silence filled only by the tapping of Sakusa’s fingers against his keyboard and the crinkling paper in Kuroo's tightening fist.

“What?” Kuroo asks, finally, after mustering enough strength to pull the word out from somewhere deep within himself.

Sakusa’s fingers still against his keyboard. He looks over his shoulder, makes blank eye contact with Kuroo. “That’s an isobutyl group.”

And like that, he’s looking away again, scrolling through his spreadsheet.

Kuroo, after hesitating for a moment, scrambles desperately to pull out the answer sheet his professor had provided them. It’s somewhere in his binder at the foot of his bed, and after a few moments of flailing and flipping through sheets Kuroo has it in his hands, scanning it hurriedly for problem number eight, which sits there low on the page, staring back at him blankly: _isobutyl group._

Kuroo stares at Sakusa again, but he’s looking away.

  
  


***

  
  


“I am having a panic attack.”

It takes Kuroo a couple seconds to process this, because Sakusa announces to their dorm room that he is having a panic attack with the same disinterested tone of voice he uses to announce that he is going to do his laundry. Or that he is going to the library and will be returning very late. Or that Kuroo has just taken one of his pens, but that he would not like it back, please keep it, do not bring it near me.

“What?” Kuroo manages, only realizing after he says it and it hangs in the air like a heavy weight that it was definitely the wrong thing to say, and also several moments too late.

“I am having a panic attack.”

Kuroo looks to Sakusa. He’s sitting on his bed with his back to the wall and his feet hanging off one end, legs together, hands folded in his lap. He’s staring at the far wall, at Kuroo’s once-again-crooked _Kodzuken_ poster, as if he can see straight through it. He’s still got a mask and his overcoat on, which should have been a sign, Kuroo realizes. His shoulders and curls are still flecked with snow from outside, the lingering reminder of the snowglobe scene taking place outside of their window. Kuroo glances outside and peers between the snow-covered bars of the fire escape down onto the alley below, where the floodlights spill yellow light out into the footprints on the street that must be Sakusa’s. It’s late, he’s only been back from class for a couple minutes; Kuroo imagines him making the trek from campus back to their dorm, a solitary figure robed in black, wringing his hands, shuffling through the snow beneath the glowing window of their dorm room. Kuroo looks back to Sakusa. Did the panic attack start out there?

“What am I—” Kuroo finds himself on his feet, overcome with a sense of purpose. His swivel chair swivels in his absence and taps against the back of his thigh. He stares at Sakusa. “What would be best for me to do?”

Sakusa’s gaze breaks from the _Kodzuken_ poster and flicks to Kuroo. Kodzuken, Kuroo thinks. Kenma had panic attacks sometimes back in high school. He’d said they came out of nowhere, when he least expected them: a sudden sense of doom that didn’t have a cause and didn’t exactly have an answer, just had to be waited out. Kenma had always asked Kuroo to either sit beside him, or to back-to-back with him, or take his PSP from his hands and play his game for him, so he could watch until his breathing slowed. That memory of Kenma’s bedroom floor is incredibly distant to him now, impossibly far removed from the snow-dusted roommate sitting on the bed in the dorm room across from him, whose brittle eye contact and guarded posture now make him seem small and vulnerable in a way that he has never seemed small and vulnerable before. In a way that makes Kuroo’s insides contort.

“Stay here.” Sakusa’s voice cracks.

And Kuroo flinches, but then immediately regrets it and nods at him. He hesitates for a moment before sitting back down in his desk chair, entirely unsure of what to do with his hands. Or his legs. Or his entire body. Or Sakusa’s eye contact, which then breaks.

Sakusa Kiyoomi has panic attacks, Kuroo thinks. Is it okay to be surprised? Does he have any right to be surprised? What had he imagined laying beneath that sheen of dispassion, that stiff 192-centimeter frame? He’s drawing a blank, now, and feels a pang of embarrassment at the realization that he didn’t really imagine _anything_ going on in there, least of all panic attacks. Maybe some messed-up part of him had assumed that Sakusa was as emotionless as he presented himself, and simply spent all day thinking about laundry. Or isobutyl groups. Or Lysol.

Worse: maybe he’d taken Sakusa’s apparent disinterest in him as permission to treat him with the same level of disinterest. Or negligence, even, which now, in the face of Sakusa’s helpless look of panic, seems in dire need of being made right. _Stay here_ , Sakusa had said. Kuroo stays put now with as much urgency as one can stay put. He stares down at his laptop and idles his cursor over his web browser, blanking on what he was about to do, and finds himself instead longing for a way to get across just how urgently he is staying put. To communicate to Sakusa, somehow, that he is staying put as hard as possible.

“Where I can see you. Somewhere where I can see you.” Sakusa amends his original statement, then, to the far wall. A pause. “Please.”

And Kuroo is on his feet again instantaneously with the same overwhelming sense of purpose, and aborts his initial step towards his bed to reach back for his laptop, which he pulls onto his comforter with him. He settles himself into place until he’s sitting opposite Sakusa, the two of them facing one another from their beds, feet hanging off the edges. Kuroo does an admirable job of pretending to be occupied with his laptop for the first few seconds before he can no longer stop himself from glancing up at Sakusa, who he discovers is looking towards him, but not quite at him, his gaze fixed somewhere on Kuroo’s blanket beside his right knee. His chest is rising and falling visibly beneath his puffer coat. The fat snowflakes that decorate his shoulders and hair have begun to melt, and one of them is leaving a streak of moisture over the moles on his forehead.

Kuroo catches himself staring at that head of curls and awaiting another instruction, fingers pressed against the metal surface of his laptop in eager anticipation of another opportunity to show Sakusa just how willingly he will stay put for him, or relocate to a different part of the room again, or sit shoulder-to-shoulder with him and gently take his wrist in his hand, the way he used to with Kenma; how willingly he would quietly count the freckles on his arm all the way down to that wrist, until his breathing steadies and slows. But no instruction comes, and the blank look in those eyes above that mask doesn’t shift. Kuroo tips his head back, the plastic of the _Kodzuken_ poster crinkles against the wall, and something deep within him aches.

Several minutes pass. Kuroo tries to return to his work, and fails. His cursor swirls around uselessly over an empty tab of Google Chrome. What was he supposed to be working on? They’ve always kept this kind of distance between one another, Kuroo realizes, when he looks up again and Sakusa’s eyes are shut; they’ve always orbited one another at the walls of this narrow dorm room, diligently maintaining as wide a gap as possible, as if the slightest move towards the other might make the ceiling fall in on them. And with the two of them on their beds, mirror images of one another, this is no different. But now Kuroo watches the snowflakes melt into Sakusa’s curls, and it feels impossibly close.

  
  


***

  
  


Sakusa Kiyoomi is 192 centimeters tall, a pre-med, and was never supposed to be Kuroo’s Tetsurou’s roomate. When he had materialized, eldritch-like, in the doorway of Kuroo’s dorm room three weeks ago—which was supposed to have been _exclusively_ Kuroo’s dorm room—and explained with incredible dispassion that _There was some mix-up in the pre-med dorms, they put me here, I tried to get a single, I didn’t, don’t touch my things,_ Kuroo had to stop himself from asking what Sakusa was even doing _here_ to begin with.

 _Here_ being this dorm building, or Tokyo University, or even university _at all_. Sakusa Kiyoomi was the number-one wing spiker at the high school level in all of Japan, and here he was, backlit by the hallway’s fluorescent light, staring at Kuroo, in _college_ . A part of Kuroo had wanted to stand up and touch him gently on the shoulder and direct him elsewhere with brotherly patience, to explain that there had been some kind of mistake, perhaps even inform him that he was _Sakusa Kiyoomi,_ number-one ace in all of Japan, that this was _college_ and not the national team’s training gym, and that there was certainly a very important volleyball game that he was missing.

Instead Kuroo had swiveled around in his swivel chair, dug his nails into his thigh, and blasted him with his most brilliant grin.

The awareness only came later, as they were awkwardly discussing bathroom arrangements, that Sakusa Kiyoomi had absolutely no idea who Kuroo Tetsurou was. This brought with it the realization that Sakusa Kiyoomi also had no idea that Kuroo Tetsurou knew who _he_ was, which suddenly painted his every stiff movement and word in Kuroo’s presence with a dramatic irony so exquisite that Kuroo later found himself at his desk pinching the knuckle of his index finger between his teeth in order to soothe himself.

But that memory rings almost unjust, now: how could Sakusa have known him? The only potential opportunity for Sakusa to have met him was at Nationals in Sakusa’s second year, where they’d passed like ships in the night. Only that Nekoma had been like a ship in the night, and Itachiyama more like an incandescent yellow-green party boat, the flashing billboard advertisement that said _Sakusa Kiyoomi is the number-one ace in Japan and he’s right here and he’s ours, look at him_. The exact kind of thing Sakusa probably hated most, Kuroo now realizes in horror. Sakusa probably would have preferred to be like a ship in the night. Everyone at Nationals had known who he was: Sakusa Kiyoomi, the very person who now works around the clock at constructing impenetrable walls of anonymity all around himself.

Maybe that’s why he chose to go to college.

This thought comes to Kuroo with unnatural clarity three days after the panic attack, which is how Kuroo finds himself counting time now, absently thinking of his homework as the homework from _two days before the panic attack_ , or of his paper as the paper due _five days after the panic attack_ , as if this is the new temporal axis on which he ought to arrange the events of his life. Maybe that’s why Sakusa chose to go to college, Kuroo thinks. So that he might find himself somewhere where not everyone knows who he is, and he might have fewer panic attacks. And now he’s landed in a dorm room with someone who _does_ know who he is, who used to privately cramp with amusement over that very fact, and now also knows that he has panic attacks. Kuroo stares blankly across the room at Sakusa’s box of n96-grade medical face masks, which now seem utterly benign in their clinical orderliness. Innocent, even. Something in him aches.

Sakusa floats into their room again, later, after the same evening class that had preceded the panic attack three days before, and Kuroo catches himself stiffening in anticipation of another one. Not the same kind of angry, taught stiffening that he used to sense in himself whenever Sakusa would enter unannounced; a kind of attentive stiffening, this time, the immediate, reflexive thought of _Are you okay tonight, can I help you_ , asked with sidelong eye contact instead of words.

And Sakusa’s answer comes, _Yes, I’m okay_ , spoken with a single nod, instead of words. He clicks the door shut with his foot and slides his coat off of his frame in a single motion. Snowflakes flutter to the ground around him.

And then Kuroo is on his feet all of a sudden, because something in him has begun to ache, again, and it seemed for a split second that the only thing to do was to stand up and face himself towards Sakusa and stare at him and open his mouth to speak, and then shut it again, because now he has no idea what he wants to say. Kuroo feels his leg jittering. Part of him wants to bite the knuckle of his index finger between his teeth the way he used to at his desk whenever he would laugh at how Sakusa didn’t know who he was; part of him feels, now, that there is nothing more urgent in the world than to make up for when he used to do that.

“Huh?” is Sakusa’s only word, after several seconds of silent eye contact. He’s frozen with one finger caught in the loop of his mask, halfway peeled off. His eyebrows have shot up.

“I know who you are,” Kuroo blurts out. He then nearly chokes, because he heard how that sounded. “I played volleyball in high school, I mean,” is his feeble recovery. “I was at Nationals.”

Sakusa’s eyebrows lower, and he slowly completes the motion of removing his mask. His mouth is contorted into a frown as he pitches the mask into the bin at the foot of his bed. He doesn’t say anything, and he’s still staring, and Kuroo’s sense of doom is growing, so he continues on helplessly.

“I was at Nationals once. In your second year. My third year. It was the year that Fukurodani won. I watched your match against them.” He hears the words tumbling out of himself from a distance, as if spoken by someone else. “I thought that I should tell you, I guess, since I knew who you were from the beginning, and I didn’t say anything, and you didn’t know who—”

“You were Nekoma’s captain,” Sakusa says. “I know.”

And Kuroo can do nothing but stand there in silence.

Sakusa is back in motion, hanging his coat on the wall and collecting his backpack from the floor. “You beat Nohebi at regionals to be seeded third in Tokyo. Your team lost to Karasuno in the third round that year.” He pulls his laptop out of his bag and turns to face Kuroo again, who remains motionless. “Your setter was a second-year, number five. He was really good.” Sakusa pauses for a moment. An eyebrow twitches. “You thought I didn’t know who you were?”

“No,” Kuroo says, after a pause. The word hangs in the air. “I guess not.” He stares past Sakusa, at the door, as Sakusa makes his way towards his desk. Everything seems to swim a little bit. 

“Your defensive strategy was good,” Sakusa says, then. He shoulder-checks Kuroo as he walks past.

Kuroo catches the hint of a smile.

  
  


***

  
  


The feeling of dramatic irony is utterly obliterated, immediately, and replaced by the sense that Sakusa has been playing an extremely elaborate trick on him all along. This sense comes first at a low hum and then explodes in sudden steps, the first of which takes place the next morning when Kuroo returns early from a cancelled lecture and walks in on Sakusa sitting on the _floor_.

They spend several seconds staring at one another in silence, before Kuroo digs down deep inside and finds the strength to move himself from his frozen position in the doorframe and shut the door behind him, closing them in with one another.

Sakusa is sitting on the floor. Sakusa does not sit on the floor. In Kuroo’s mind it is dubious whether or not Sakusa has ever made _contact_ with the floor before, given the very real possibility that he uses the same eldritch magic that keeps his laundry smelling nice to hover a few nanometers over the floor’s surface at all times, so as to avoid all contact. It’s the kind of thing Kuroo wouldn’t put past him.

Worse: Sakusa is sitting on the floor exactly in the middle of their carpet, where the line dividing Sakusa’s clean side of the room from Kuroo’s messy side of the room used to exist and has since been vacuumed by Kuroo into nothingness. His computer is in his lap, he’s not wearing a mask, and is staring up at Kuroo with his eyebrows pinched together.

“Hm?” Sakusa offers eventually, when it becomes painfully clear to both of them that Kuroo is not going to say anything.

Kuroo is struck with the feeling from before, when Sakusa had first appeared in this dorm room three-and-a-half weeks ago saying it was his, and Kuroo had wanted to tell him he was mistaken; part of Kuroo now wants to reach down delicately and inform Sakusa that he is, in fact, sitting on the floor. He imagines himself speaking the words with the same gentleness and patience one might use to tell a small child that their pet has passed away. _You are Sakusa Kiyoomi and you are sitting on the carpet. You do not do this. There are germs on the carpet. You have never done this._

But Kuroo keeps his mouth shut. He simply clenches and un-clenches his hands at his sides helplessly, until he realizes Sakusa is watching him, and he stops.

“Nothing,” Kuroo says then, several moments too late. “It’s nothing.”

“Mm,” Sakusa says. His gaze drops to his laptop.

Kuroo walks past him, slides his backpack onto the floor, and lays himself down on his bed with a level of reverence and care that suggests that he is either very elderly or very fragile. He buries his face in his pillow until all he sees is black and swimming spots of white, and thinks about the concept of dramatic irony. And the triangular shape of an isobutyl group. The smell of rose-scented Lysol. Snowflakes on dark curls. The words _stay here_.

When he lifts his head several hours later Sakusa is gone.

  
  


***

  
  


Sakusa Kiyoomi sits on the floor sometimes and also apparently eats takeout leftovers from their fridge sometimes and also comes back to the dorm room very late at night with a smile on his face sometimes also apparently knows more about organic chemistry than Kuroo does and also apparently helps him with organic chemistry homework sometimes. Sakusa seems like more or less an entirely different person, since the panic attack. Kuroo is trying very hard to keep up.

The sense that Sakusa was somehow playing an elaborate trick on him explodes for a second time two days after the floor incident, in the very moment that Kuroo plants a hand on the back of Sakusa’s desk chair while Sakusa is sitting in it. They’re at Sakusa’s desk, staring at one of Kuroo’s organic chemistry assignments on Sakusa’s laptop, because Sakusa would not touch Kuroo’s laptop, so Kuroo emailed it to him so that they could look at it on his laptop, because this is a thing they do now, apparently, where Sakusa picks apart his organic chemistry assignments when he gets stuck. Kuroo is trying very hard to keep up. And then Sakusa leans back in his chair to fix Kuroo with a look, because he probably has something blunt and infuriatingly correct to say about the problem he was stuck on, and his shoulder presses against the back of Kuroo’s hand.

And Sakusa does not flinch, Kuroo flinches, actually, and makes a small strangled noise, and retracts his hand from Sakusa’s shoulder the same way people retract their hands from burning-hot metal.

“This is just polymer synthesis. This is the same stuff you were doing on Wednesday,” Sakusa says. Nothing in the way Sakusa stares at Kuroo suggests that he notices the hand Kuroo is still holding in the air, or the contorted look of shock on his face. “It’s just more reaction equations.”

Kuroo lowers his hand very slowly. “Oh, it is?” he asks. He did not hear what Sakusa said. His hand feels incredibly warm. The image of Sakusa’s hair is blurry. He is pretty sure Sakusa is staring at him, but he can't be certain. “That’s interesting,” he hears himself say. “That’s cool.”

“Do you have polyethylene and polypropylene synthesis processes memorized?”

Kuroo has had polyethylene and polypropylene synthesis processes memorized since his second year of high school, but he could not recount them for Sakusa right now with a gun pressed to his head. “No,” he says, and it’s a lie. Sakusa’s shirt was very warm. The back of Sakusa’s shoulder was very warm. Was that the first time that he’s touched Sakusa? His hand feels very warm. Has anyone ever touched Sakusa? Is Sakusa always that warm? How does polyethylene synthesis work?

Sakusa glances between Kuroo’s face and Kuroo’s right hand, which he is now holding in his left hand with a tenderness that suggests that it has been terribly burned. “No, you do remember polyethylene synthesis,” Sakusa insists. He swivels back around in his swivel chair and fixes his gaze on his laptop. Kuroo watches him swirl the cursor aimlessly over the PDF for a couple seconds, and then stop. There’s a moment where neither of them move.

“And it’s also okay to touch me,” Sakusa says to his laptop.

“What?” Kuroo says, and knows immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. 

Sakusa stares at his laptop for another moment before swiveling back around and looking Kuroo in the face. “It’s okay to touch me,” he says, with the same kind of insistence in his voice he used to use to tell Kuroo _not_ to touch him, or any of his things, or that pen, or his laptop, or _anything_ in this goddamn dorm room. With the same kind of look on his face that used to scream _stay away from me_ , _don’t look at me_ , _don’t even set foot on this side of the room_. Saskusa pulls his mask down over his chin.

There’s a moment of unreality where Kuroo pictures them from a stranger’s perspective, someone stumbling into the scene unannounced: the two of them are less than a foot apart, Kuroo hovering over Sakusa’s desk chair, Sakusa staring up at him blankly, both of them shoved as close together into one corner of the room as possible. The question asks itself automatically: _how did we get here?_

And then Sakusa reaches out and grabs Kuroo’s right hand from his left, leading to the discovery that it is not, in fact, burned; Kuroo is helpless but to watch as Sakusa brings Kuroo’s hand to his own forearm and wraps Kuroo’s fingers around it one by one, pressing them into the impossible, yielding warmth of his skin. Another moment of silence draws in as they stare wordlessly at the point of contact. Sakusa’s pulse thrums hot beneath Kuroo’s fingers. Kuroo’s pulse roars hot in his own ears.

“You can touch me,” Sakusa says, and somewhere tucked between those words there’s irritation, anger. “I’m not going to die if you touch me, Kuroo.”

And in that moment he goes numb to the warmth of Sakusa’s skin, and something in Kuroo snaps, because that’s not _fair_ , because Sakusa has spent the past month carefully laying the groundwork for Kuroo’s belief that he _would_ die if Kuroo so much as _looked at_ him, to the point that Kuroo was forcing down every thought of ever nearing those dark curls, those 192 centimeters of height, and now Sakusa’s gently pressing his fingers into the soft skin at the base of his wrist and staring him in the face and telling him to _touch him_ , and the heat curling low in Kuroo’s stomach is telling him that there’s nothing even slightly fair about that. How was he supposed to know?

Kuroo’s grip tightens around Sakusa’s forearm automatically, and he relishes in the feeling of Sakusa’s muscle yielding beneath his fingers. He, too, is soft and woundable. He, too, is human, and his pale, scrubbed-clean skin yields beneath pressure. “Yeah?” Kuroo spits out. Something very heady and warm has taken hold of him, radiating out from the point where Sakusa’s skin is pressed against his. “You’re not gonna die if I touch you, Kiyoomi?”

“No,” Sakusa spits back. Kuroo sees something dark flash in his irises. He shoves his forearm forwards, closer to Kuroo, inviting him to grip harder. Kuroo feels tendons, muscles shift beneath his fingers. “I’m not going to die if you fucking touch me.”

And Kuroo reels for a moment, because all of a sudden he has no idea where this is supposed to go; this is the kind of confrontation he’s practiced dozens of times on the schoolyard, the kind of verbal sparring that always escalated playfully with friends like Bokuto, like Kai and Yaku. It would always break down into shoving, grabbing, laughter on the floor. But this time it is different; this time he cannot plant his palms on Sakusa’s chest and shove him backwards in a brazen challenge to shove back, because that is exactly what the self-satisfied look on Sakusa’s face is daring him to do. The game is entirely different, flipped on its head: Sakusa wins, now, if Kuroo spars with him. Sakusa wins if Kuroo touches him. Sakusa is _asking_ him to touch him.

“Alright,” Kuroo says, and he’s grinning now, because he knows how to win. “I believe you.” 

He lets go of Sakusa’s wrist.

  
  


***

  
  


Sakusa Kiyoomi is 192 centimeters tall and no longer wears face masks in Kuroo’s presence and sometimes leaves a worn shirt strewn on his bed and also sits on the floor with his back to Kuroo’s bedframe sometimes and will now take Kuroo’s laptop without flinching if Kuroo hands it to him. Sakusa Kiyoomi also hasn’t been touched by Kuroo in two weeks and three days.

The feeling that Sakusa was playing a trick on him is gone, and a game of chess has developed in its absence. It’s played out within the walls of their dorm room, over long stretches of time, in the form of not-looking and not-touching.

In the form of Kuroo stepping around Sakusa when he’s sitting on their carpet in a conspicuous show of not-looking and not-touching, in the form of Sakusa passing Kuroo a sheet of paper from one of his assignments with his fingers at the edge in invitation and Kuroo conspicuously avoiding all contact with those outstretched fingertips, in the form of Sakusa leaning back against his desk chair when they’re doing homework together and Kuroo pulling his hand away from it in time.

It’s the kind of opaque behavior Kuroo is learning to expect from Sakusa. This is the same enigmatic, inscrutable figure that could identify the chemical formula for an isobutyl group from Kuroo’s mumbling alone. It’s the same blank-expressioned roomate that has panic attacks and announces them like the weather forecast. It’s the same student that turned down the opportunity to play for Japan’s national volleyball team in order to go to Japan’s most selective university. It’s the same person who saw the challenge written in Kuroo’s release of his wrist two weeks ago, and who is now hell-bent on getting him to grab it again.

  
  


***

  
  


Kuroo walks in on the next panic attack. Sakusa is in the same position on the bed as last time: legs together, feet out, hands folded in his lap, gaze fixed on the wall.

Sakusa makes eye contact with him and doesn’t have to say anything for Kuroo to know, immediately, and to ask: “What should I do?”

“Somewhere I can see you.”

And Kuroo situates himself with his laptop on his bed, across from Sakusa, and mirrors his posture. He doesn’t have to look up from his work this time to know that Sakusa’s gaze is somewhere on his blanket beside his right knee. This ends quicker than the last, with Sakusa sliding off of the bed a few minutes later and bringing himself to the bathroom with only a curt, _I’m good now I think_.

Kuroo watches the bathroom door shut behind him. A single thought: if Sakusa had asked him to touch him, even if it meant losing, he would have done it.

  
  


***

  
  


“Serratus anterior.”

“Superior ribs eight and nine,” Sakusa says. He’s staring at the ceiling with his arms stretched up over his head. He sounds bored, and Kuroo knows this means he’s focused.

“Insertion?” Kuroo asks. He flips the flashcard.

“Vertebral border and angle of scapula.”

“Action?”

“Abducts scapula and rotates it upward.”

“Mm.” Kuroo pulls out the next card. “Flexor carpi radialis.”

“Medial epicondyle of the humerus.”

“Insertion.” The sound of a flashcard flipping.

“Third and fourth metacarpals.”

“Action.”

Sakusa doesn’t say anything, and Kuroo waits for a second before looking over. This is something they’ve done before; a comfortable habit, now, Kuroo rattling off Sakusa’s anatomy flashcards from his position on the other side of the room, Sakusa throwing back chemical formulas for Kuroo to draw and then erase with his hoodie sleeve on the whiteboard tacked to the wall. Sakusa’s final for his anatomy class is in January, and they’ve been prepared since October. Sometimes they do this from their beds, sometimes from the floor, sometimes out of the blue when Sakusa is working on something else and Kuroo throws a word like “ _l_ _evator scapulae_ ” at him and watches, with a growing smile, as Sakusa briefly stops whatever he’s doing and rattles off the _insertion_ and the _action_ side of the flashcard without missing a beat.

Kuroo looks over now and finds Sakusa sprawled out on his bed with one arm in the air. He’s flexing his wrist, gently, savoring the time he has to answer the question, and Kuroo realizes he’s probably looking at a million things that Kuroo cannot see. Words like _scaphoid_ and _lunate_ and _flexor carpi radialis_ scattered over his skin in a living, breathing anatomical diagram visible to no one but him. The ghosts of ancient latin, words that Kuroo has flipped through with his fingertips and read aloud and heard spoken back to him in that disinterested baritone enough times that they carry unpracticed, imprecise suggestions of meaning. The association of the words _teres minor_ with the image of Sakusa’s shoulder. _Acromion_ at the end of a clavicle.

“Action,” Kuroo says again in impatience. He’s sitting up straighter, staring at Sakusa this time.

“Wrist abduction,” Sakusa says, and he turns his head to make eye contact with Kuroo. His wrist stays in the air, abducted.

Kuroo only glances away from him to read the next word, before looking back. “Flexor carpi ulnaris.”

It’s another muscle in the forearm, the twin sister of the one on the previous flashcard. He knows the answer before Sakusa says it: “Medial epicondyle of the humerus.”

“Insertion.”

Sakusa doesn’t break eye contact. “Pisiform, hamate, fifth metacarpal.”

“Action.”

Sakusa adducts his wrist. “Wrist adduction.”

Kuroo pulls the next card. “Pronator quadratus.”

Sakusa doesn’t say anything, he just keeps his eyes on Kuroo. A pause. He lowers his wrist, slowly wraps it in the fingers of his opposite hand. There’s a mole on his index finger, right beside the second knuckle, a pinpoint reminder of the two on his forehead. Sakusa tightens the grip on his own wrist until the skin flushes white, holds it out further for Kuroo to see. This is their game of chess. “You show me,” he says.

“What?”

“Pronator quadratus. Show me where it is. On me.”

The flashcards go still in Kuroo’s hands. He hasn’t looked, yet, at the written location of _pronator quadratus_. But Sakusa has his wrist outstretched and his fingers pressing into the inside of it, and the words _distal anterior ulna_ are already on Kuroo’s lips, the ghost of a flashcard repeated a dozen times. Kuroo can imagine that Sakusa can see the answer written across his face, the same way he probably sees _triquetrum_ and _trapezium_ written across his skin in the supple stretch of white where his palm ends and his forearm begins. The same way Kuroo can still see the ghosts of his own fingerprints there, where Sakusa’s own hand now is: the blazing-hot sense memory of two weeks ago, blood and sinew and warm skin yielding beneath the pressure of his fingertips. 

_I’m not going to die if you fucking touch me._

“Show me.” Sakusa repeats, because Kuroo’s side of the room has gone quiet. He thrusts his wrist out further.

Kuroo doesn’t know that much about desire. He doesn’t know that much about Sakusa Kiyoomi. He only knows an ever-lengthening list of facts, a series of numbers and words about him, the first being _192 centimeters_ , followed by _room 126E_ , followed by _pre-med_ , followed somewhere along the line by _n_ _96_ and _CH3_ _,_ the word _isobutyl_. The image of footfalls in the snow, fat snowflakes melting into curls. Rose-scented Lysol. The request: _Stay here. Somewhere where I can see you._

Later, the abstract concept of a muscle called _latissimus dorsi_ , followed by the lines of Sakusa’s back beneath a t-shirt. _Splenius capitis_ , where Sakusa’s coat collar brushes against the curls at the nape of his neck. _Brachioradialis_ at the soft swell of his forearm. The sound of a flashcard flipping.

Kuroo doesn’t know that much about desire. He doesn’t know that much about wrist anatomy, or their game of chess, or at what point Sakusa went from not wanting Kuroo to touch him to laying on his side in his bed and holding his wrist out into the middle of the room and asking him to. Kuroo doesn’t know at what point he went from lying in his own bed to crossing the room to do just that.

His foot meets the line in the carpet that used to indicate who had vacuumed and who hadn’t. It’s gone, now, replaced by the matted-down indentations from when they sit on it together with their legs outstretched and study.

Kuroo kneels with his knees to Sakusa’s bedframe. Their gazes meet, pupils blown wide, over the uneven landscape of Sakusa’s bedsheet. Kuroo pulls Sakusa’s forearm from his opposite hand, and wraps his wrist in his fingers. They both stare at the point of contact.

Kuroo presses his thumb to his wrist’s supple underside, and watches his skin flush and yield under the pressure. _P_ _ronator quadratus._ Blood, sinew, and bone, pulsing white-hot beneath the pads of his fingers. He, too, is soft and woundable. He, too, is human, and his pale, scrubbed-clean skin yields beneath pressure. Kuroo hears his heartbeat in his ears.

A challenge, spoken with a hand outstretched. _Show me._

Kuroo leans down, and presses his lips to Sakusa’s wrist.

**Author's Note:**

> hehehehehehehe
> 
> hello! i am june i'm [summersugawara](https://twitter.com/summersugawara) on twitter.
> 
> i know this is the first fic in the kurooomi tag which makes me glow with pride and also glow like a fool. i do not know if this being the first fic in the kurooomi tag means that i am the head boss bitch, or the head fool. but regardless of what label this has earned me, thank you so much for reading it! if you've just gotten through 7k of a rarepair you've never thought about before in the slightest then i am really really happy! i LOVE THEM!
> 
> and normally i say something at the end of my fics like "comments make me cry in public bathrooms" because it's true but given that we're on covid-19 lockdown i will say this: comments make me cry in the safety of my own home!


End file.
